One year after the 2025 wildfires reshaped large swaths of Los Angeles, the physical signs of recovery remain uneven.
In some neighborhoods, rebuilding is well underway. In others, properties have been cleared but still sit idle, or remain caught in layers of review, testing and approval.
The contrast is visible across communities and jurisdictions, and it raises a familiar question for anyone in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry: Why does recovery slow so dramatically once the immediate emergency ends?
Reporting over the past year points to a range of contributing factors. Coverage from The Wall Street Journal details how insurance challenges, permitting delays and uneven access to capital shape who’s able to rebuild—and when.
The New York Times, meanwhile, has examined how fire behavior, infrastructure failures and post-fire conditions complicate recovery long after flames are extinguished.
Built, in the wake of the fires, explored these issues from the construction side, including the realities of hazardous debris cleanup and the long tail of rebuilding in fire-prone urban areas.
Together, these accounts point to a broader structural issue: Wildfire recovery is often treated as a series of necessary but disconnected actions—cleanup, environmental clearance, permitting, insurance review, rebuilding—rather than as a single, continuous effort.
Without a framework that connects those phases, progress depends less on how much work is being done and more on how effectively one stage hands off to the next.
Why recovery breaks down
Wildfire recovery, as the WSJ and NYT reporting shows, spans multiple, distinct phases, each governed by its own rules, timelines and stakeholders. Hazard mitigation and debris removal give way to environmental testing and clearance, followed by permitting, insurance alignment and reconstruction. Each phase is complex, regulated and essential. Each is also typically managed by different entities using different tools, records and standards.
On their own, these phases often function as intended. Cleanup crews focus on safety and environmental compliance. Regulators verify site conditions before allowing rebuilding to proceed. Insurers require documentation before releasing funds. Contractors wait for approvals before mobilizing.
The breakdown usually doesn’t occur within the work itself, but between phases.
When recovery is managed as a series of discrete tasks rather than as a unified program, handoffs become friction points. Information is recreated instead of transferred. Decisions are revisited because earlier context has been lost. Projects stall not because efforts stopped, but because each transition introduces uncertainty that didn’t need to exist.
For anyone who’s worked on large capital programs, this pattern is familiar. Without shared sequencing, ownership and documentation standards, even well-funded projects struggle to maintain momentum.
Wildfire recovery is no different. The conditions are more volatile and the stakes higher, but the coordination challenge is the same one the industry confronts on complex, multi-stakeholder projects every day.
The issue isn’t a lack of expertise or commitment, but the absence of a program-level approach that treats recovery as a continuous process rather than a collection of isolated actions.
Cleanup is phase one, not a prequel
In urban wildfires, cleanup is often framed as a preliminary step—necessary but separate from the “real” work of rebuilding. In practice, cleanup is the first major construction phase of recovery, and the decisions made during it shape everything that follows.
As Built wrote in March 2025, post-fire cleanup in dense, developed areas involves far more than debris removal. Crews must identify and manage hazardous materials, address contaminated soils and ash, conduct environmental testing, and document site conditions to meet regulatory and insurance requirements.
When those records are incomplete, inconsistent or siloed, the downstream effects are immediate. Environmental clearance slows. Permits stall. Insurance claims linger. In many recovery efforts that struggle to gain traction, cleanup is treated as temporary or transactional—handled quickly, documented loosely and then left behind once debris is cleared.
The result is a reset when rebuilding begins. New teams are forced to re-establish site conditions, reverify earlier work or recreate documentation that no longer exists in a usable form. Time’s lost not because work wasn’t done, but because the continuity of information was broken.
Recovery efforts that move more steadily take a different approach. Cleanup is treated as the first milestone in a longer sequence. Documentation produced during debris removal and environmental testing is designed to carry forward into permitting, insurance review and reconstruction planning. Cleanup outputs become formal inputs to the phases that follow, reducing rework and uncertainty.
For AEC professionals, this dynamic isn’t new. Early site investigations, enabling works and environmental assessments routinely shape scope, schedule and risk on large projects. Wildfire recovery follows the same logic.
When cleanup is treated as phase one of a multi-year effort rather than a standalone task, it becomes a foundation instead of a bottleneck.
What a project mindset looks like in practice
Treating recovery as a project doesn’t require reinventing how construction works. It requires applying principles the industry already relies on—phasing, sequencing, ownership and documentation continuity—to a context where they’re often missing or underdefined.
A project mindset starts with clearly defined phases and intentional handoffs. Each stage of recovery has a purpose, a responsible owner and a set of outputs that enable the next stage to proceed.
Cleanup establishes verified site conditions. Environmental clearance confirms readiness to rebuild. Permitting and insurance alignment provide scope and funding certainty. Reconstruction advances with fewer unknowns because earlier decisions were made deliberately rather than reactively.
Across recovery efforts examined by government auditors and infrastructure agencies worldwide, coordination often matters more than raw funding in determining how quickly this sequence moves.
Programs with significant financial resources still stall when approvals, standards and documentation are fragmented across agencies and timelines. Others progress more smoothly by aligning expectations and sequencing early, even under tight constraints.
Documentation is the connective tissue that makes that alignment possible. In long-duration recovery efforts, records aren’t administrative byproducts. They’re the infrastructure that allows work to continue as teams, contractors and public officials change over time.
When documentation persists across phases—tied to the site rather than to a single stakeholder—projects spend less time revisiting past decisions and more time moving forward.
None of this is foreign to the AEC industry. Large capital programs, campus expansions, transportation corridors and utility upgrades rely on the same fundamentals. They succeed because early phases are designed to support later ones, and because information’s structured to survive complexity.
Wildfire recovery becomes more predictable when it’s managed with the same discipline.
What AECO teams already know and can apply
For AEC professionals, the mechanics of recovery-as-a-project aren’t new. The industry routinely manages multi-year efforts that involve layered approvals, regulatory oversight and changing teams.
Wildfire recovery introduces additional pressures, but the underlying coordination challenge remains the same. When cleanup aligns with downstream needs, when documentation is designed to persist and when stakeholders work from a shared sequence, recovery efforts move with greater predictability.
Built’s coverage in February 2025 on rebuilding in Los Angeles underscores that technical capability isn’t the limiting factor.
The opportunity lies in applying existing project discipline more deliberately, and earlier, in the recovery process.
Looking ahead
As wildfires grow larger and recovery efforts stretch over longer periods, the line between disaster response and capital construction continues to blur. Recovery increasingly resembles a multi-year construction program, whether it’s managed that way or not.
The lesson from Los Angeles isn’t that recovery is uniquely difficult—but that recovery works best when it’s treated as a continuous effort, guided by the same discipline that governs complex projects across the built environment.
For the AEC industry, that perspective offers a practical path forward: By applying familiar project principles to an unfamiliar context, recovery can move with greater clarity, fewer resets and a stronger foundation for rebuilding what comes next.
